[XeTeX] Hyphenation in polyglossia - Latin and Greek

[John Was]

Of course the accentual system isn't so very ancient since it came into 
being in late antiquity - the traditional reason given is that scholars 
began to realize that people were no longer pronouncing Homer's text 
correctly so they needed some help.  In the classical era no one used 
accents, or even capital letters (not even spaces between words, usually).

The polytonic system looks nice (and I'm the last one to want to see it 
disappear) but is strictly over-elaborate in modern Greek since the standard 
language no longer uses varieties of tonic accent - so one accent would in 
fact do the job (native Greek speakers don't need it at all really, since 
they all know where the accent comes anyway!).

This is slightly tongue in cheek, as I hope people realize (!)...

John




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yannis Haralambous" <yannis.haralambous at telecom-bretagne.eu>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2009 3:58 PM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Hyphenation in polyglossia - Latin and Greek


> Le 16 mai 09 à 16:33, wodzicki at math.berkeley.edu a écrit :
>
>> I just checked MiKTeX Options, the Language tab. The relevant portion:
>>
>> Language      Hypehenation Table        Synonyms
>> --------      ------------------        --------
>>
>> (...)
>> greek         loadhyph-el-polyton.tex   polygreek
>> monogreek     loadhyph-el-monoton.tex
>> ancientgreeek loadhyph-grc.tex
>> (...)
>>
>> So, it seems, Yannis should be satisfied, especially so that `greek'  in
>> MiKTeX by default is polytonic.
>>
>> Mariusz Wodzicki
>
> That's nice, indeed.
> Maybe it would be clearer to call those three languages:
>
> modernpolygreek
> modernmonogreek
> ancientpolygreek
>
> and even that is not very accurate since the main difference between 
> modernpolygreek and ancientpolygreek is that some prefixes are  separated 
> etymologically in hyphenation of ancient Greek and  phonetically in 
> hyphenation of modern Greek (for example, one would  hyphenate ὑπερ-αξία 
> in ancient Greek and ὑπε-ρα-ξία  in modern one). But this is not an 
> absolute rule and some publishers  will accept the etymological rule for 
> modern Greek.
>
> And (modern) Greek was certainly hyphenated in the etymological way  until 
> the middle of the 20st century...
>
> So it wouldn't surprise if me someone uses that set of patterns for 
> modern Greek (or some intermediate set of patterns: that's what I have 
> done for some publishers, and I ended up having a different patterns  file 
> for each of them...).
>
> yh
>